1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates to apparatus for applying a liquid coating of food products by submergence in the liquid.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The present invention has broad application to the coating of a variety of food products with various liquid materials. However, it has particular utility in the coating of food products which are buoyant in the liquid used. For example, the ice cream sandwiched between a pair of cookies to form an ice cream sandwich is buoyant. When such a sandwich is submerged in a coating liquid such as chocolate syrup, the sandwich tends to float and frustrates efforts to coat the sandwiches by moving them through the liquid on a conveyor belt.
A typical prior art method for coating ice cream sandwiches with chocolate syrup involved manual placement of the sandwiches in an open mesh wire basket. The basket is pressed down into the chocolate syrup to overcome the buoyancy of the sandwiches. The coated sandwiches are then manually transferred onto trays. The excess chocolate syrup runs onto the trays and partially solidifies. This is wasteful of syrup and also makes it difficult to separate the sandwiches which are adhered to the trays. It is present practice to place the trays in a special freezer or hardening room to reduce the temperature of the trays enough for the chocolate coated sandwiches to be more easily broken free of the trays. The separated sandwiches can then be wrapped for storage or shipment.
The waste of materials, the high cost of the manual operations, and the capital investment required in expensive freezers undesirably raise the price of the final product sold to the public.
Another system of the prior art utilized conveyor belts which dipped down into the chocolate syrup only enough to coat the bottoms of the sandwiches. The top and sides were supposed to be coated by passage of the sandwiches through a falling curtain of chocolate syrup. However, this wasted syrup since it tended to pile on top of the upper cookie, and also the upper cookie acted somewhat like an umbrella and prevented the chocolate syrup from reaching the sides of the sandwiches. The sides could only be reached by side sprays, but this then limited the coating operation to a one-line assembly; that is, only one sandwich wide, and the production rate was very low.